I've been writing testbenches in VHDL more than any other task, and there I normally use HEX or BINARY. I've recently realized, and supported that belief with several texts, that VHDL doesn't "speak" decimal. I've long thought that if a function is naturally oriented to a decimal value then the value should be expressed in decimal.

For example, just to keep it simple, if I want to divide a clock by a million, exactly 1E6, how does one tell VHDL that's his intent? It would make it clearer than putting it in the HEX equivalent.

It's easy enough in a classic TTL schematic, since you then use decimal counters, which makes the diagram supremely understandable, but it's more efficient (of bits) to express the terminal count in HEX and use binary counting.

RE